The Hewlett Foundation Blog

Lucy Bernholz has a short (as in two white-board sketches short), fascinating blog post about a conversation she had recently with Sara Davis, the Hewlett Foundation's Director of Grants Management, on the past and future of philanthropic organizational structures.

A version of this post appeared earlier this summer at GMNsight, the professional journal of the Grants Managers Network -Ed.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Or so our neighbors on Sand Hill Road here in the heart of Silicon Valley will tell you. They wear failure like a badge of honor, because it shows they were brave enough to take real risks. True to our roots, The Hewlett Foundation has long embraced failure, too. A perfect grantmaking record would be a sign that we’re not taking the risks that are necessary to accomplish our goals. So, we welcome failure. Not for itself, but for what it can teach us about our work, and how we can do it better.

That kind of growth requires real candor, introspection, and honesty. And there’s risk in that, too—exposing ourselves to criticism, pointing out our own errors in judgment, taking the chance that we might not like what we find. We don’t often think of it this way, but honesty is a risky virtue, maybe the riskiest. It’s one that can push us out to the fringe—of what’s comfortable for us and acceptable for our organizations. Real honesty about our failures takes real bravery. But it’s worth the risk.

In 2012 our Grants Management department was a brand new team—completely reorganized with me as the leader of a new staff working in newly defined roles within the Foundation. Our first priority was to develop trust and cooperation with the Foundation’s program staff. We were an unknown quantity, so it was important to build credibility. We had to prove ourselves as valuable assets to help the Foundation accomplish its goals.

We were inspired to demonstrate to our colleagues how helpful we could be by solving a nagging problem—longstanding confusion over the precise due date for the Foundation’s grantee reporting. The Foundation has two due dates for these reports: a defined due date and a grace period after that date (an additional 30 or 60 days). This grace period creates consistent confusion about the real due date, and when a report is truly late. Staff and grantees can (and do) point to either date as the “correct” one. Our team identified fixing this as a worthwhile and low-risk challenge, a relatively simple way we could bring more clarity and efficiency to the reporting process. Low hanging fruit, so to speak. We thought clarifying the reporting date question would be an easy project to lead and implement. We were wrong.

Our initial conversations with program staff quickly showed that there were strong opinions about what to do. Staff differed widely in their opinions on how to improve the process—including a sizable contingent who felt the process was fine just the way it was. We learned from staff with international portfolios that the grace period was important for foreign organizations to manage document translations, exchange rate accounting, and the timing required for expenditure responsibility reporting. We learned from program staff how the grace period had been used to maintain goodwill and collaboration in their relationships. Other staff were frustrated with the convoluted dichotomy of a “real” due date and a “sort of” due date. They had a hard time explaining it to their grantees and didn’t fully understand it themselves. They wanted to eliminate the grace period and have just one clear and final due date.

Taken off guard by these unexpectedly strong opinions, my team had a hard decision to make. A project we thought would win us support turned out to put us right in the center of controversy and differing opinions. Ultimately, we left the reporting dates the way they were, because we decided the risk of confronting strong opinions wasn’t worth the potential damage to the relationships we were just starting to form.

The Madison Initiative has had some productive back and forth with David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy this summer—here's his initial critique of the Initiative and our response. David subsequently talked with Madison Initiative Director Daniel Stid to discuss our strategy and how it's beginning to unfold. While we have agreed to disagree with David on some issues, his post from earlier this week, Inside the Madison Initiative: Here Is How Hewlett is Taking On Polarization, provides a helpful overview of the early efforts on the Madison Initiative. We especially appreciate his point that “There are no rigid milestones or metrics or predictive models here. Rather, Hewlett's plan is to engage in three years of exploratory funding of work that could point the way to more moderates getting elected, reduced gridlock in Congress, and more constructive public engagement in civic life.” And while it's clear that we see the world a bit differently, we appreciate the discussion of our work that's come out of Callahan’s blogging.

Those spiral-bound volumes of memos in black-and-white 12 point Times Roman font stacked up on your desk. That iPad portal with tabs and bookmarks and links to more files than you care to count, let alone read.

Yes, I’m referring to board books – those triennial, quarterly, or (god help you) monthly volumes that we foundations produce for our boards.

Meant to instill confidence and help boards usefully engage in strategic issues, producing these books can become a heroic effort in its own right – and often the driving force behind a foundation’s yearly cycle of deadlines. But are we really helping our boards understand the progress we’ve made, or the challenges we’re facing, when we force them to wade through 300 pages of text? As one program officer put it, “We should be giving them USA Today, not Anna Karenina.”

Last year our president decided it was time to for a change. Over a period of nine months, we redesigned and rolled out a new set of materials for our board.

What did we change?

We live and breathe our work each day, but our board – busy people with important day jobs – needed to be reminded each meeting of what we’re trying to accomplish. So we created a series of upfront framing materials – a one-pager summarizing the goals of each program; a timeline of all our strategies and initiatives; a pie chart of our total budget by program area. Each program’s materials also began with a summary of goals and budgets.

We also rearranged and streamlined some things. Traditionally, each program listed their grants in alphabetical order and there was a separate list of paragraphs describing the grants. Instead, we ordered the grants by strategies and then by size so board members could better recognize patterns and clusters of work. We also numbered each grant and put the paragraphs at the back, so board members could easily look up any particular grant they were interested in. We also removed the multi-paged tables in which we painstakingly detailed all the indicators we were tracking for each strategy of our work. Instead, we piloted an approach by which each program rated its progress via a Harvey ball icon (similar to the ones Consumer Reports uses for its ratings), and then wrote narrative text to explain their assessment.

Last, we made it easier on the eyes. Each program got its own consistent color used throughout the book. It added vibrancy and helped the board visually track our programs. We used fonts that were easier to read (Franklin Gothic and Georgia) and added more photos and charts.

So how’d it go?

You’ll never get it right the first time. When our task force came up with a recommended design that the president approved, everything looked beautiful, perfect, and ready to go. But some things turned out to be harder to implement than we expected and we had to adjust the initial design. One year, later, we are still making adjustments. The Harvey balls mentioned above did show progress in a quickly digestible format, but they weren’t nuanced enough for board or staff. So this year, we are experimenting with a multi-faceted rating system that includes long-term progress, contextual factors, and partnerships. While we think it’s more informative, my hunch is we’ll need to tweak it again next year.

Involve all parts of the foundation, but be clear about roles and decision rules. Within a foundation, the board book touches every part of the building. Take for example, the grant recommendations list—Finance checks the numbers, Grants Management and Legal verify compliance and structure, Programs take responsibility for the content, IT creates the software that generates the list, Communications reviews wording, and the President’s Office manages the whole process. We assembled a cross-foundation task force for designing the book, but when the inevitable questions arose during implementation, it wasn’t clear who was responsible for answering those questions or making those decisions. Was it still the design team? If not them, who? Was it the president? Was it those implementing the changes? Being clearer up front about roles and decision rules during the iterative implementation phase would have saved a lot of confusion.

Think holistically. When we started this process, we limited our scope to revising the November board book, our “big” book, in which budgets are approved and annual memos are written. In the process of re-designing the November book, we realized that the other books all referenced the November book. It didn’t make sense to re-design one without considering the others. So we ultimately revised our scope to work on the other two so that the books were not disjointed. Luckily, our task force agreed to stay on for this additional work.

We didn’t make our ultimate goal of cutting our board book in half, though we did get it down to 126 pages, from 194 the year before. Even so, I feel exactly the way one board member does: “ I don’t miss the old book at all.”

Do you love your board book? Or have a good board book revision story? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

A new report from Latino Decisions and Hispanic Access Foundation (a grantee of our Environment Program) analyzed nine public opinion polls from the past three years to find strong, consistent support for environmental conservation among Latinos in the United States:

“This report provides definitive proof to what we’ve seen across the country – there is a significant, growing Latino movement that is advocating for greater environmental protections of our parks and public lands and is willing to support candidates that share that same value,” said Maite Arce, president and CEO of Hispanic Access Foundation. “The Latino population is the fastest growing segment in the country — their engagement in conservation is critical and could have a far-reaching impact.”

I almost always ask grantees what’s missing from their ecosystem. Understandably, they look at me blankly. Then I explain: What could other organizations do that would make your work have greater impact? No one organization can do it all, so what else should we support to complement your efforts?

It turns out this is a hard question for most people to answer. Everyone recognizes that creating positive social change takes varied skills and strategies, but people are focused almost exclusively on their own organization. Mostly, they want to expand the scope and scale of their own activities. It’s tough to endorse funding others when their own organizations never seem to have enough.

If you ask researchers what’s needed, for example, you often get a list of the research projects they themselves would like to tackle with available household survey data, rather than a wish list of types of data that would permit them to answer core questions with more precision and fewer assumptions, if only others were funded to collect and share it. If you ask advocates what would make it more likely for their work to make a difference in real-world policy, you usually get ideas about larger and more elaborate campaigns that their own organizations could undertake, rather than suggestions about funding more relevant research or enhancing the media’s ability to understand and communicate about their field. Organizations delivering health services or educating kids are more likely to highlight the need to cover larger populations instead of emphasizing the value of investments in new products, financing arrangements, quality certification systems, or the development of a stronger evidence base.

The ecosystem or field-level view is precisely what we try to have when we’re thinking about grant making. We can make the case for supporting a given organization not only because of its intrinsic importance or brilliance, but because it plays a distinctive role: the impartial source of cutting-edge analysis, the edgy advocate, the trusted insider. Few things make us happier than seeing different organizations we support spontaneously working together toward a common end, because it’s validation that we guessed right about the complementary nature of the work. And we are much, much more likely to make the right guesses—and contribute in the most high-impact ways—when we get advice from the trenches.

What are the patterns of civic engagement that we need for a healthy representative democracy? What is required of the citizens represented—individually and collectively—for it to be successful? What, if anything, can philanthropy do to help cultivate this kind of citizenship, when by its nature it is diffuse and subject to myriad social factors that encourage or work to undermine it?

We have been wrestling with these questions from the outset of the Madison Initiative. Last week they were again brought to my attention as I read Marc Dunkelman’s compelling new book, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.

I won’t be able do justice here to the full sweep of Dunkelman’s creative synthesis, in which he brings together many varied strands of wisdom— from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy to Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort and Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, to sample just a few. All the while Dunkelman is weaving in his own powerful insights.

At the heart of Dunkelman’s argument is the importance of what he terms “middle ring” relationships. These can be defined in part by what they are not —neither the “inner ring” relationships of one’s nuclear family and close friends, nor the “outer ring” relationships that are “passing to transactional,” a result of “a single shared interest or experience.” By this he means professional acquaintances, but also social media connections with far flung people who happen to share your passion for, say, Patsy Cline, the Detroit Tigers, Friedrich Hayek, or unstinting environmentalism.

Middle ring relationships, in contrast, are “familiar but not intimate, friendly but not close.” Think here of the talkative neighbors who always buttonhole you when you are walking your dog, fellow members of the Kiwanis Club, the parents of your children’s classmates with whom you arrange the weekly carpool, the “regulars” you have lunch with in the cafeteria at work, the other members in your National Guard unit, and the guys who play in your standing Tuesday night pickup basketball game, etc.

If you’re having trouble identifying with these examples, you may be seeing Dunkelman’s point by now. Our middle ring relationships are atrophying, and the social consequences are profound. “Today, if you don’t know your neighbors—if you’ve transferred social capital away from the middle rings—your political frame of reference is limited both to the people you love most and the legions who, through outer-ring networks, share your point of view.”

The problem is that middle ring relationships have, from the era of Alexis de Tocqueville’s townships to that of Jane Jacob’s front stoops, formed the basis for our political community. Middle ring relationships are where we are most likely to rub elbows with people who may not always agree with us yet we cannot avoid, where we come to appreciate that at times you need to go along to get along, where we learn informally to lead—and to follow. These relationships are primary school for citizenship, and we’ve become truants.

Dunkelman connects the dots between the demise of the middle ring and the mounting problems of our nation’s politics. “Absent the fundamental ability to understand those on the other side of a cultural or political divide, it’s almost impossible to stomach the possibility that “our” representative in Washington might be the one collaborating with people who represent a different flavor of constituent.” The art of compromise—as essential to governing in the halls of Congress as it is in city halls in Paducah or Poughkeepsie —has thus become a dirty word. “The institutions that frame American society no longer line up with the routines of our daily lives.”

To his credit, Dunkelman doesn’t leave us with pat answers or solutions to this dilemma. He doesn’t suggest that we can somehow go back to the patterns of citizenship that Tocqueville or Jacobs observed and celebrated. Rather, he challenges us to adapt our institutions to the social changes that have been disrupting them, and to explore ways in which we can put our evolving networks and relationships in harness so that we can better govern ourselves. Friends, neighbors, citizens: We’ve got our work cut out for us!

Three years ago I was in rural India directly participating in one of these surveys in the almost unbearable heat of summer. I was with two Indian colleagues who were hard at work mapping a village in Uttar Pradesh under the direction of the village headman. We were squatting in the shade but there was no escaping the hot, humid air.. A crowd formed around us as my colleagues sketched the village’s different neighborhoods on the pavement with chalk. The crowd moved quickly from bystanders to participants, offering advice with hand gestures and rapid Hindi—“No, no, the school is across the road from the well, not next to it!” Or at least that’s what I imagined them saying. My Hindi was—still is— next to nonexistent, but there was no mistaking the interest they took in us and our map.

Eventually the villagers asked us why we were there. Why were we drawing a map of the village? What had we come here to do? My colleague explained that we were doing a survey. We wanted to see if the children of this village could read.

That day was actually a dress rehearsal for a much larger survey. My colleagues were preparing for the Annual Status of Education Report, or ASER (pronounced ah-sir) for short. ASER means “impact” in Hindi and is aptly named since the goal of the survey is to see what impact education is having.

This year, it’s likely that more children will finish elementary school than ever before. This is not just because there are more fifth graders in the world than ever before. It is also because today most children go to school, no matter where in the world they were born. In an extraordinarily short amount of time the world has managed to make the opportunity to go to school nearly universal.

But what about the opportunity to learn?

For a long time people were so focused on counting whether or not children were attending schools that they did little accounting for how much learning was going on. ASER is an effort to address that gap. So are similar surveys like Uwezo in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, Bèekunko in Mali, Jàngandoo in Senegal, and ASER Pakistan. Collectively these efforts assess over one million children, every year, in their homes. As my colleague Rukmini Banerji, Director of ASER, points out, the surveys help “demystify learning for mothers, fathers and family members—especially those who are not literate or do not have much schooling—and make it possible to see what learning looks like.” The findings show that a mere half of fifth graders in India and Pakistan can read, and a mere 20% of fourth graders in Mali can subtract. This has put pressure on governments to place due attention not only on whether or not children finish school, but whether or not they leave with the skills they need to thrive.

To complement the video released this week, the photo essay below explores these assessments in progress, as captured during that sweaty summer day in Utter Pradesh and other visits to the field.

Hundreds of thousands of books have been written about business leadership, with new titles coming out each year. There is a growing literature about what it takes to build and lead high-performing nonprofit organizations, and a trove of research and writing exists on military and political leadership. Precious little has been written, however, about what it takes to successfully lead a philanthropic organization.

While a number of good books about philanthropy have been published lately, each touches only lightly on the subject of leadership, and none focus much attention on the role of the CEO. A recent National Center for Family Philanthropy report about the role of the CEO in a family foundation context makes an important descriptive contribution to the field, but there is room for more research and insight into what it takes to be a successful foundation CEO.

In the past two decades, the number of foundations in the United States alone has more than tripled, rising from about 32,000 foundations in 1990 to approximately 115,000 today. Given the proliferation of foundations, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in assets that foundations control, it is essential to ask: What makes foundation CEOs successful? What makes them fail?

Despite the growing number of children in developing countries that are attending school, they are not reaching the levels of numeracy and literacy that they should. Some have called this a “learning crisis.” According to Rakesh Rajani, Head of Twaweza, previously “it [was] very hard to make that case and get policymakers to pay attention because we didn’t have data, we didn’t have evidence.” But now we do.

Now, civil society organizations across the world from East Africa to Southeast Asia are empowering communities to collect and use this data to demand better results for their children through citizen-led assessments. In eight countries, these groups are conducting household surveys to better measure all children’s learning, regardless of their school status.

The video below, produced by Made in Africa TV in Tanzania, describes the program and illustrates both the need for collecting household-level data on children’s learning, as well as the opportunities for better policies and action presented by this innovative approach.